Development Of Supersonic Separator And Study Of Its Flow And Heat And Mass Transfer Characteristics

Dehydration is a very important process for natural gas pipeline transportation, since it can effectively prevent various problems in gas facilities. The traditional natural gas dehydration technologies have many advantages, such as good dehydration performance, very low dew point, etc, but there are also many disadvantages such as huge facilities, large investment, complex mechanical work and potential environmental pollution.In this paper, a new type of dehydration unit called supersonic separator is introduced and a theoretical and experimental study is systematically carried out. The main work is as follows.Systematic theoretical studies on the principles and design considerations of supersonic separator were carried out and its design methods were presented. Two designing methods for Laval nozzle were introduced, and based on this work a design software for supersonic separator was developed. All the critical dimensions of supersonic separator can be obtained by simply inputting the parameters at the inlet of supersonic separator and the molar fractions of different components of natural gas into the design software mentioned above.An experimental rig of supersonic separator was constructed and systematic experimental investigations were carried out. The results of this part of the study show that the supersonic separator has a satisfactory dehydration performance without any need of external mechanical power and chemicals. The influences of pressure loss ratio on its dehydration performance were also studied. It is well indicated by the results that the pressure loss ratio is a key factor that determines the dehydration performance of the supersonic separator, increasing pressure loss ratio usually improves its separation performance. The minimum requirement for supersonic separator to accomplish its basic function is that the flow inside the separator must be at the critical state at the Laval nozzle throat and its flow rate must be equal to its critical flow rate, or the dehydration performance will deteriorate. The...